To increase profits and improve customer experience, retailers often develop diagrams that specify where and in what quantity items should be placed on shelves, pegs, in vending machine slots, or other merchandizing fixtures. These diagrams are known as planograms or POGs. In general, to develop a planogram, a planner selects several items for inclusion in a planogram (known as item or product assortment) and determines relative placement of these items within the planogram (known as item layout). While a relatively effective planogram for two or three items may be quickly generated by simply trying various combinations and relying on subjective judgment, developing a quality planogram for tens or hundreds of items is a highly complicated task.
Moreover, retailers often operate hundreds or thousands of stores or retail areas, where each of the stores has a unique arrangement of merchandizing fixtures (e.g., shelves and floor space). In order to develop planograms for each of these stores, a retailer needs: (i) an accurate mapping of the physical arrangement of merchandizing fixtures at each of the stores; and (ii) an accurate labeling of the mapping which indicates where certain types of products are currently placed within a store. In many cases, store managers or employees are tasked with manually providing such a labeled mapping to a retailer (e.g., by physically walking through the store and recording the location of product types). However, manual generation of labeled mappings is time intensive and often results in erroneous or out-of-date mappings of retail areas and planograms that are inconsistent with actual store layouts. A retailer can lose significant amounts of money if a cycle of error prone store mapping and inconsistent planograms generation persists, not to mention creating employee frustrations with planogram related miscommunications.